Field
The present embodiments relate to driving displays from a computer system. More specifically, the present embodiments relate to techniques for securing protected video content during video playback on the computer system.
Related Art
Interactions between a user and a computer system may be facilitated by connecting external displays to the computer system. For example, a laptop computer may include a standardized video interface such as Digital Visual Interface (DVI) or High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) that allows the laptop computer to be connected to displays with different resolutions, dimensions, pixel densities, and/or color profiles. In turn, the connection of an external display to the laptop computer may allow a user of the laptop computer to increase the amount of screen space available for viewing documents, media files (e.g., video, images, etc.), and/or graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for applications on the laptop computer.
Unfortunately, the driving of an external display from a computer system may be associated with a number of security vulnerabilities. In particular, video data used to drive the external display may be subject to eavesdropping as the video data is sent over a video interface to the external display. To protect the video data from eavesdropping, a protection mechanism such as High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) may be used to encrypt the video data before the video data is transmitted to the external display. However, an eavesdropper may bypass the protection mechanism by exploiting vulnerabilities in untrusted software on the computer system and/or lapses in the encryption of the video data.
Hence, what is needed is a mechanism for enforcing the protection of video data during the driving of an external display using the video data.